Rune Effects Affect Every Skill

Posted By: February 11, 2011

This probably comes under the heading of “info everyone reading this fansite already knows” but since there are always new readers finding the site for the first time, and people catching up on Diablo III info, I’ll quote it. It’s from @Diablo today, answering a question about Runestones in movement skills.

You said that runes are attached to all active skills. Does this mean you can alter teleport and the other mobility skills?—FingolfinGR

Indeed you can. One rune makes teleport an offensive spell, dealing damage where you land.—Diablo

I say that we knew this already since rune’d Teleport was one of the first examples we ever got of skill rune effects, back at Blizzcon 2008. As we were told at the time, Teleport with a Striking Rune adds damage to all nearby targets, and Teleport with a Multistrike rune creates multiple copies of the Wizard, each of which attack monsters with spells, for a short period of time. We’ve even got some sequence screenshots of it in the wiki article.

Of course that was a long time ago. An eternity in game development time. So it’s nice to hear that at least one of those effects remains in the game, given that runestones have evolved greatly in name and function since then.

The larger question is what runestones do in movement skills and other non-offensive attack skills that don’t have obvious effects, and that’s something we’ve debated quite a bit in the forum, and look forward to seeing in the final game. We only know a tiny fraction of runestone effects at this point, and a lot of the changes we know about are really quite ingenious.